IFA2030: Contemplating the Future of Plant Nutrition

15 November 2018

As the world grows towards 10 billion people, creating greater natural resource constraints, and as new technologies change our lives and our possibilities more than ever before, the global fertilizer industry wishes to define its place in this future.

To help do this, IFA embarked on a long-range strategic planning process using scenario planning methodologies. We focused on the most pressing issues facing the fertilizer industry as a way to extend thinking and test preparedness; a ‘wind tunnel’ for designing industry-wide and company-specific approaches that are informed, robust and anticipatory.

Developing scenarios means thinking about alternative plausible futures and imaging what could be. They are a back-drop to strategy discussions, helping companies think about what could be, not what has been, nor are they predictions or ‘blue-prints’ for how the future will unfold.

Our expectation is that these scenarios will be used to facilitate discussions with regulators, governments, suppliers, customers, civil society groups, educators, scientists or adjacent industries. In this context, the work will help to build a bridge between assumptions, perspectives and requirements of those external stakeholders and how the industry would or could respond to such perspectives and requirements.

10

JAN

Dr Rolf Sommer

On how climate change may affect the tropics, the state of the world’s soils and the biggest agricultural developments by 2030.